By Grace Williams and Cindy Pardo, Co-Chairs, 175th Anniversary Planning Committee

About three years ago, the Board of Trustees formed a committee to explore what we, as a congregation, should do to celebrate the 175th Anniversary of our congregation.  They asked the two of us to chair that committee, for which we are so grateful.

We have had a wonderful journey these last few years.  What began as questions to the congregation about their wishes for our celebrations have become reality.  

Guest Ministers

We have had engaging and stimulating visits from former ministers and members of our congregation who became ministers, among them: Rev. Martin Woulfe, Minister, Abraham Lincoln Church, Springfield, IL, Rev. Dr. Om Prakash (John Gilmore), Director, Racial & Social Justice, Joseph Priestley District, UUA, Rev. Dr. Sydney Morris, Minister, Keweenaw UU Fellowship, Houghton, MI, Rev. Dr. Terasa Cooley, Director, Congregational Services, UUA, Rev. Dr. Mark Morrison-Reed, Retired Minister, Author and Adjunct Professor, Meadville-Lombard Theological School, Rev. Rob Eller-Isaacs, Co-Minister, Unity Church-Unitarian, St. Paul, MN, and Rev. Dr. Thomas Chulak, Retired District Executive, St. Lawrence District, UUA.

Children's Celebration Concert and Party

We had a delightful children’s party, complete with a magician, ballerinas, and, of course cake!  Just what our children asked for.

Celebration Concert

We commissioned a musical work to continue our long dedication to good music. Our talented Michael Thorn composed an inspiring choral work, “Song of the Universal,” which premiered on April 30, with our choir and soloists.  It is a major piece of choral writing, and we were delighted to have a full house for the premiere concert. CDs of the recorded concert will be available for sale in September.

Social Service Project

By year’s end, our Social Service Project will have collected and distributed 4,800 each soaps, toothpastes, deodorants and shampoos, and 2,000 toothbrushes to clients of the Hyde Park-Kenwood Food Program.  This program included great participation from our Religious Education Director, Virginia LeBeau, and from our R.E. families.  These items are not supplied through food stamps or other hunger programs.  We are working with the Hyde Park-Kenwood Interfaith Council to engage other churches in continuing this effort.

Gala Celebration

On Friday, May 20, just 4 blocks from the site of the first meeting of our society, we celebrated the amazing history of the First Unitarian Society of Chicago and the people who make up our congregation in the 21st century, with a Gala at the Chicago Cultural Center's Preston Bradley Hall, attended by some 160 members and friends. The event was successful beyond our greatest hopes.  

We had entertainment by the Chicago Children’s Choir, with a generous offering by the choir and its President and Artistic Director, Josephine Lee.  We heard special greetings from members of the religious community and Cook County Board President, Toni Preckwinkle. Our Silent Auction featured an amazing array of items, and was nearly sold out! There was a toast – to us!  Joan Pederson put together a lovely PowerPoint presentation on our history, and Tom Huyck a great exhibit of photographs, document and handout materials. We even had slide show of photographs of our current membership. We heard nothing but enthusiasm about the evening and hope those who attended had as good a time as we did!

We took time to thank all our team members who have given so much time and talent to creating this celebratory year (see list below), and all the volunteers who helped on-site at the Gala, including the people who helped with registration, Silent Auction staffing and check-out, bar ticket sales and greeting, namely: Jodi Smith, Allen Harden, Kathryn Scott, Marge Saphir, James McClarty-Lopes, Val Free, Ann Collins, Adrienne King, Mitchell Stern, Rita Stern, Norma Poinsett and Kedda Williams.

We had special thanks to Jodi Smith for her invaluable assistance in tracking reservations, program ad book sales, and silent auction donations, and Jan Holt, our on-site manager for the gala, to ensure that each element of the set-up, meal and program went smoothly.
The event would not have achieved the success it did without the contributions of the following people:

Visionary (purchasing a table & full-page ad)

Tom and Margaret Huyck
Richard and Cindy Pardo
John and Margaret Saphir

Change Maker (purchasing a table & half-page ad)

Stephen Stern and Catherine Harth Stern

Sponsor

Colleen Grogan & Michael Grosse - flowers

For purchasing a table and/or additional guest tickets:

Richard and Rosemary Snow
Richard Blough
Dolores Cross
Jarmila Hruban
Michael Jones
Joan and Chuck Staples
Lara Tushla

Anita and Jamie Orlikoff for their generous gift to help underwrite the anniversary celebrations.

John Martin-Eatinger for designing our logo, 175th Anniversary Banner, and skilled photography for our picture directory, cover photo, and many other images of the anniversary year.

Michael Sonnenfeld for providing, free of charge,  professional design skills for the production of the Gala Invitation, Gala Commemorative Booklet and associated printed material.

Ave Sims for invaluable assistance in organizing our Silent Auction Solicitation.

Rick Brown, Church Administrator, for his tireless and patient attention to every request asked of him over the past year to make this major event in the life of the church a success.

We anticipate that the Gala achieved a modest fundraising goal from the Silent Auction, Program Booklet advertising and ticket sales, which was one of the goals of our committee.

In addition, we appreciated the contributions of all who subscribed to the  175 Circle, and purchased logo items throughout the anniversary year.

We inadvertently omitted the following people from the 175 Circle list published in the Gala Program booklet:
Patricia Stern
Stephen and Catherine Harth Stern

Our sincerest apologies to them.

Thank you so much for the privilege you have given us – of allowing us to express our own admiration and vision for our church home by creating some of the events of the past year.

175th Anniversary Planning Committee:
Cindy Pardo, Co-Chair,
Grace Latibeaudiere-Williams, Co-Chair
Michelle Collins
Margie Gonwa
John Martin-Eatinger
Anita Orlikoff

Gala and Event Planning Sub-Committee:
Michelle Collins
Jan Holt
Joan Staples
Catherine Stern

History Sub-Committee:
Tom Huyck
Alek Lappin
John Martin-Eatinger
Joan Pederson
Rosemary Snow

Social Service Planning Committee:
Ann Collins
Leslie Davis
Mary Lee Greenlee
Allan Harden
Allan Lindrup

A Homily by Rev. Dr. Nina D. Grey
First Unitarian Church of Chicago - September 26,2010

Sometimes denominations send a minister to evangelize and plant a new church. But in the case of our church back in 1836, it was a group of youthful men who took advantage of the visit of a Unitarian clergyman to Chicago. It was they who set up a meeting in a hotel and invited him to join them. Right then and there they decided to make themselves into a church.

This church has experienced strong lay participation and leadership from 1836 to the present. When I came in 1999, two of the lay members were Gary Yasutake and Wallace Rusterholtz. Gary Yasutake took all those pictures we saw and the ones we won’t see today – and when I say all those pictures, I mean not only the ones ones in 3 large albums, I also mean huge boxes of them! And Wallace Rusterholtz, a devoted atheist and humanist, was profoundly interested in religion, gave sermons even into his 90s and he wrote a history of our church.

These were old men, but still very active. Both of them walked to church from quite a distance! But Wallace notes in his history that the founders of this church were youthful men. And so were some of the earliest and most successful ministers, one of them only 22, and another only 21 years old. This church was ready to appreciate the wisdom and gifts of youth and age, then and now.

Our first building was where Daley Plaza is now. The second one was at Balbo and Wabash. It survived the Chicago fire, and in the wake of the fire, we provided emergency housing. Throughout subsequent generations and ministries, we supported three ministries at large, founded programs like the Depot which ministered to runaway teens and their families, and the Chicago Children’s Choir which drew children and youth into interfaith, interracial alliance to make excellent music and change the world; we provided leadership for racial integration of our neighborhood, and were willing to struggle through the disagreements that the Black Empowerment period brought to our own congregation.

We contributed people power and financial donations to the civil rights movement, headquartered the Illinois Commission for the Medical Control of Abortion, and in 1969 we conducted a moral audit of our investments. Much of our civil rights activism began during the ministry of Leslie Pennington, after whom the Pennington Center is named. During Jack Mendelssohn’s ministry, we joined the Alliance to End Repression, endured FBI infiltration of our congregation, and joined with the Alliance to fight police repression.

Some speak of the Spiritual Pluralism Project’s contribution to the inclusivity of our church life. That project was nurtured on seeds planted in former years. Rev. Von Ogden Vogt imagined our church as a place where many faiths would find room to worship. His vision resonates with that of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf;

For Imam Rauf envisions his Islamic Cultural and Community Center in New York City as a way to build understanding across faith divisions. Wikipedia calls Imam Rauf a bridge figure for our times.

Von Ogden Vogt, who served this church from 1925 to 1944 was a spiritual bridge builder too. Though his vision of religious inclusivity did not fully materialize, this church did house the Quaker Meeting for a time, and named a large upstairs room after a prominent Quaker, George Woolman. And so, today, nurtured from those seeds, we are members of the Hyde Park and Kenwood Interfaith Council which calls us to work with peoples of other faiths and join in dialogue for greater understanding.

Some seeds of our development as an inclusive Congregation which would welcome and cherish the participation of all, were planted in the 1950s, when the congregation voted “Be it resolved that we, the members of the First Unitarian Society, do take it upon ourselves to invite our friends of other races and colors who are interested in Unitarianism to join our church…to participate in all its activities, pledging ourselves to seek to become one with them, even as we ask them to become one with us.” Seeds were planted in the 50s and 60s as we organized the Community Conference and successfully fought against white flight and for integration;

And Jack Mendelssohn strove for a spirit of inclusivity in his ministry. He explained in an interview: “In this church we attempt to interweave many styles, many themes…mysticism and social action, the culture of Western civilization and the cultures of the East and the third World.”…

Some seeds of inclusivity were planted in the early 1970s when a gay caucus formed, and the congregation voted to affirm the formation of an Office of Gay Affairs at the UUA headquarters; and some were planted as we became a Welcoming Congregation in the 1990s during the ministry of Terasa Cooley. These inclusivity movements were not without struggle but we persist and hopefully learn from our struggles.

First Church history shows a steady thread of care about children and young people.  You organized the first free Sunday School in the city; consistently fostered programs for the children of working families, programs like a free kindergarten, the Kenwood Ellis Nursery School which became the Hyde Park Unitarian Cooperative Nursery School.

You housed a Head Start program and founded the Unitarian Pre-School. First Church invited and still invites the use of our facilities by programs that serve children. Today these include the Little People’s Learning Center, the Chicago Children’s Choir Neighborhood Choir, the Parent Support Network, The Hyde Park School of Dance, and weekly Ala-Teen meetings.

We move forward through the ages, sometimes facing hardships and losses, and rallying to thrive, sometimes losing a clear fix on our mission but then rediscovering a sense of mission, seeking again and again to be the church we want and strive to be.

We stand in unbroken line with those early strong lay leaders and with faithful lay leaders, members and ministers through 174 years and counting. They are the cloud of witnesses who call us to faithful service as we see fit. And we will be the cloud of witnesses for those that go beyond us, calling succeeding generations to listen for and respond to the call divine. So may it always be. Amen.